What Is Life?

In which an engineer positions himself among Von Neumann, Turing, Boltzmann, and expects you to take the photo.

What Is Life? is the first installment of Blaise Agüera y Arcas's What Is Intelligence?

Hark, it's a New Kind of Science. Blaise Agüera y Arcas has cracked it: unlike Minecraft, Excel, and billiards, the particular Turing completeness of ribosomes and DNA means something intrinsic not just about life, but intelligence itself. We are computers! Why? We contain computers! Wait, isn't that tautolog—Coincidentally, the whole cast of heroes for every physics undergrad is here, and their ghosts all are primed to explain why cellular automata Brainfuck can divine the fundamental properties of life and intelligence.

We are granted this boon because Agüera y Arcas made a simulation on his computer, and he was clever enough to recognize that one of the emergent phenomena resembled a Von Neumann machine. Whereas many would be content thinking they've made a system full of amusing little guys, Agüera y Arcas contextualizes this simulation, through a series of imprecisions and conflations, as the lynchpin that centers computation as a fundamental frame to view life (and other stuff too, probably). How fortunate for the former Bing engineer that the language of the universe also happens to be that of his craft.

Glibness aside, it's difficult to make much of the claims in this text as it is self-aware that it is a sampling of the canon told with tenuous connective tissue—to challenge the connective tissue is to misread the poetry of the provocation; to over-index on the provocation is to ignore "the science." In one moment, the simulation is a toy, a representation; in another it is the thing. Concepts become disembodied from one domain and liberally applied to another. Conventions are challenged by the mere existence of an alternative.

I'm familiar with semantic slippage and bold assertions as standard fare for the provocative multidomain text, and in fact, I crave them: to let oneself be seduced by aesthetics (conceptual and otherwise) that pull you over the threshold is to have something naughty for a treat (and the presentational aesthetics are beautiful). The issue, however, is that it reads more as a reflection of a man seduced than a man trying to seduce you.

Anyways, I'm not sure how I got here. Something to do with a friend-of-a-friend. I stare up from my drink and in front of me is a coiffed man who has come to take my attention. He is talking about matters I can only assume are important. The man leans in and whispers:

Life is self-modifying computronium arising from selection for dynamic stability; it evolves through the symbiotic composition of simpler dynamically stable entities.

Strange, I think. He smiles at me. He knows what life is.